What is Search Engine Marketing?

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. It is actually a form of internet marketing that the online marketers use in order to promote website visibility. It is actually a process to gain visibility for the websites in search engines. Three processes are generally used in order to get a successful result from SEM. The three processes are Paid Placement, Contextual Advertising, and Paid Inclusion.

In the process of SEO or search engine optimization, the website contents are optimized in order to achieve a higher ranking in search results. SEO includes some specific techniques such as targeting particular but relevant keywords for a site and then promoting the keywords in the search engines through some different SEO techniques. All these things increase the credibility of your site which ends up getting traffics for the website. 

Differences between SEO and SEM:
Well, SEM is a part of online marketing that incorporates a slight portion of SEO. SEM is actually a broad part that includes both Paid Search Results i.e. Ad words, and organic search results i.e. SEO. A compact SEM must not leave any stones unturned regarding Adwords, pay per click, article submission, advertising, and more importantly other parts of SEO. The marketers should perform keyword analysis both for SEM and SEO, however, not necessarily all the time for SEM.

Important SEM Tools:
Most of the Online Marketers use these following tools to continue with their SEM campaigning: 

1. Keywords Analysis: Keyword research and analysis is the major part of SEM to start with. To make sure that your site gets indexed by the search engines, you should do proper keyword research. To do this you have to research on the most popular key phrases relevant to your site. After that by using those key phrases for organic SEO, you can generate traffic for your site. 

2. Web Analytic Tools: This is a most important tool that can help you to find out what is happening to your website and you can also measure the success rate of your website. These tools can provide you information related to your website conversion. Apart from that you can also use HTML validators for your site in order to check the invisible parts of your website. 

3. Indexed Page and Link Checker: By using these tools you can very easily check the saturation of the website and the popularity of the site in the search engines. Actually, the number of pages of your website that are indexed can help you get an idea on how much saturated is your website. At the same time, the numbers of links of other sites in your site, can help you get the idea how much popular is your own website in search engines. 

Benefits of SEM:
1. Increases Your Bottom Line: As SEM can help you to get new leads, brand awareness, and recognition in the web, it can create a good impression for your website in the web. It can also help you to promote your products, get new customers, improve customer relations, ultimately, to increase the bottom line of your site. 

2. Increases Your Local Business: One of the great importance’s of SEM is that it increases your local business. With the help of SEM you can promote your business to the local people by mentioning your local details, area code or ZIP code, phone numbers etc. 

3. Increases the Traffic of Your Website: According to a recent study of Georgia Institute of Technology, search engine sends over 85% traffic for a website. So you can understand how important SEM is to increase the traffic for your website. 

4. Deliver an Active and Targeted Message to the Online Customers: During these days, consumers are searching on the web for their necessary products. They are searching on the net by specific keywords. So when you are targeting your keywords in the search engines, the consumers surely hit your sites through your keywords.

To sum up, it can be said that Search engine marketing is an effectively cost effective way to grow your web based business. If you own a medium sized business, search engine marketing is, perhaps, the best procedure to boom your business.